Reptilian conspiracy theories don’t usually get a cumbia-punk soundtrack, Son Rompe Pera wrote one anyway. “Reptilio,” the Mexico City band’s lead single from their forthcoming third album on Mixto Records, takes the 1950s B-movie premise wholesale: shadowy figures in government, cold eyes behind human masks, the nagging suspicion that the people in charge are operating on entirely different instincts to the rest of us. Co-bandleader Mongo puts it plainly: “People always say I believe way too much in conspiracy theories, aliens, the Illuminati, and all that. But it’s a bit strange that as we grow up, a lot of those things that everyone used to laugh off as fake are … proving to be real.” The song, he says, is asking those questions directly: “Are our leaders really reptiles in disguise? Haha, well, sometimes they act like that, but we’ll probably never know. But maybe our kids will find out the truth.”
The track was recorded at Adrian Quesada‘s Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, a studio whose analogue warmth has shaped some of the most distinctive Latin-rooted records to come out of Texas in recent years. Quesada, Grammy-winning producer and co-founder of Black Pumas, brings exactly the kind of cross-border fluency the band were looking for: someone who understood the Mexican musical story but could also hold the wider range of influences Son Rompe Pera have accumulated across nearly a decade of relentless touring. The marimba sits at the centre of the arrangement as always, the brothers Kacho and Mongo Gama‘s inherited instrument given here a sci-fi edge, its wooden tones cutting through a punk-driven groove that carries the paranoia of the lyric in the rhythm itself.
The forthcoming album features collaborations with LA crooner Trish Toledo, Bogotá salsa dura outfit La Pambelé, Zac Sokolow of La Lom, and Spike Slawson of The Gimme Gimmes. The Reptilio Tour is underway now, running through the US East Coast and Southern California before a European run this summer.
Stream, listen to and get your copy of “Reptilio” HERE